'Time to Leave' Drama. Written and directed by François Ozon. (In French with English subtitles. Not rated. 85 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

François Ozon is one of France's most provocative and watchable filmmakers I especially like his two movies with Charlotte Rampling ("Under the Sand" and "Swimming Pool"). So it's sad to have to say that his latest effort, "Time to Leave," isn't up to his high standards.

It's about a gay Parisian fashion photographer who learns he is dying of cancer, and how he deals with the news. Films on this topic tend to be maudlin, or else they work so hard at not being sentimental that the effort shows. Time Out magazine has a pungent term for these pictures, calling them "few-months-to-live stories."

Part of the problem is that our hero, Romain (Melvil Poupaud), is very difficult to like -- he's imperious toward underlings in his trade, and when he finds out he is dying, he banishes his boyfriend in a hurtful way and viciously insults his married sister during a family dinner. Ozon takes pains to emphasize that this is not a nice guy -- Romain uses cocaine, frequents S-M clubs and (gasp) dislikes children. This last point is made repeatedly.

Romain begins to loosen up a bit when, on his way to visit his beloved grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), he stops at a cafe where a sympathetic waitress (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) sits down to chat with him. His visit to Granny further humanizes him, and the luminous presence of Moreau gives the film a needed boost. Romain, who has otherwise been unable or unwilling to reveal his condition, immediately tells the old woman, who turns out to be his soul mate. She cooks him dinner and mooches a cigarette, they trade various revelations and later he sleeps in her bed (platonically, I should add).

At times Romain sees visions of his childhood self -- he relives an incident in which he and a pal pull off a nasty prank in a church. But the whole conceit of his staring face-to-face at his boyhood image pushes the film a little too far in the soppy direction.

It's how the weepiness is handled, not weepiness itself, that's the issue. Ozon has acknowledged his debt to Douglas Sirk, the great '50s director of melodramas dealing with loneliness and an assortment of social malaises. But Sirk, who always bolstered his soap opera material with acerbic undertones, had some sense of perspective on his usually misfit protagonists, and a sense of sly humor I found missing from "Time to Leave."

The redemptive return of the waitress character, and the unusual proposal she and her husband make to Romain -- to say nothing of his response -- strain credibility and have a today's-hot-topic flavor.

Despite all this, Ozon brings the story to an affecting end, as the increasingly pale and emaciated Romain comes to grips with his mortality. He has a brief, touching reconciliation scene with the sister he offended, and the conclusion, as Romain, still alone, visits a beach and takes a swim, has real impact. This is a testament to Ozon's skill, because much of the film works to undercut any sense of real emotion.

"Time to Leave" is reportedly the second in a trilogy of films about people confronting death -- in the first, "Under the Sand," the Rampling character had to come to terms with her husband's abrupt disappearance (and presumed demise) during a seaside vacation. That film had a sense of mystery and grace that, until the ending, is missing here, and I hope the third installment is as genuinely and consistently persuasive as the first.

-- Advisory: Sexual content makes this film unsuitable for children.

-- Walter Addiego

'Only Human'

Comedy. Starring Marián Aguilera, Guillermo Toledo and Norma Aleandro. Directed by Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri. (In Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles and in English. R. 85 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

It takes some chutzpah to appropriate the oft-quoted closing line of "Some Like It Hot." But Billy Wilder himself would have smiled to hear "nobody's perfect" uttered at the end of a film called "Only Human" because the title says much the same thing about people's shortcomings.

True to its title, the Spanish comedy exposes human frailties. In a nod to Wilder, it does so in appropriately madcap fashion. A familiar situation of a beloved daughter bringing her intended home to meet the folks is pushed to sublimely silly extremes. You laugh at first out of recognition and then because of the ridiculousness that ensues. The film often teeters at the edge of implausibility, but is continually pulled back by a script grounded, however precariously, in reality. Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri, the husband and wife who co-directed and wrote "Only Human," have good instincts about how far they can go.

From the first glimpse of Leni (Marián Aguilera) and her fiance, Rafi (Guillermo Toledo), arriving at the Madrid airport for the momentous family dinner, you're immediately won over to their side. The actors winningly convey two people crazy in love. They can't keep their hands off each other.

Waiting for them with dinner half cooked are Leni's eccentric mother (played with much verve by the marvelous Norma Aleandro, an Oscar nominee for "Gaby"), a brother who's going through a phase of being an Orthodox Jew and an older sister, who has come back home to live but goes out every night to pick up men, leaving the family to watch her precocious 6-year-old. There's also a blind grandfather who fought for Israel in several wars and keeps a loaded pistol as a memento. Dad is away at work, as he usually is, although nobody seems to know exactly what he does.

Rafi's anxiety about meeting them all is heightened when he discovers that Leni has led them to believe he's an Israeli when in fact he's Palestinian. The prospect of what might happen if she marries someone of another religion is the film's weakest link. Mom initially gets hysterical -- you halfway expect her to break into a chorus of "A Boy Like That." But then she calms down and the issue is more or less dropped until the end.

The black humor comes when Rafi, asked to help thaw out a mass of split pea soup, accidentally drops it out the window of their high-rise apartment while attempting to entertain Leni's young niece. Horrified, Rafi realizes it has landed hard on a passer-by, who appears to be knocked out cold and may even be dead.

For the rest of the night, everybody runs off in different directions both literally and figuratively as the possibility arises that the pedestrian could be Leni's dad.

The filmmakers infuse "Only Human" with a lot of sex. It's done in a casual way rarely seen in American movies. Rafi is more or less propositioned by Leni's mother and sister. The sister's description as a nymphomaniac -- a word not often heard anymore -- doesn't seem far off when she stops for a quick tryst with a guard in her father's office building while the rest of the family tries to locate Dad to see if he's still breathing. There's a manic quality to the film that may wear you down. But at least you won't be bored.

-- Advisory: Sexual situations and language

-- Ruthe Stein

'Azumi'

Action. Starring Aya Ueto, Shun Oguri. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. In Japanese with subtitles. Not rated. 128 minutes. At the Lumiere.)

Ryuhei Kitamura is 37, but he makes films like a 15-year-old fanboy. That is, he has no sense of story, his visual style is basically point-and-shoot, the boys are cool and rebellious and the girls are cute.

He is primarily known for "Versus" (2000), a strange action film set in a forest that, despite a bit of a cult following, just isn't very good. Since then, among his many projects, he has personally killed off the "Godzilla" franchise with the awful "Godzilla: Final Wars" and made two films about a samurai heroine, "Azumi" and "Azumi 2."

"Azumi," made in 2003, opens today at the Lumiere, and while this may not be much of a compliment, it is probably Kitamura's best film.

Set in the 19th century, it is about a group of orphans trained by a master to become samurai. Their purpose in life: to assassinate corrupt warlords who rule sections of Japan.

The most talented of the group is a young woman, Azumi (pop idol Aya Ueto), whose skills ultimately lead to a pull-out-the-stops CGI-enhanced finale.

Admittedly, the movie is often fun. But the story lags, and there are twists that make no sense but seem to be there because Kitamura thought it would be cool. For example, there is the scene in which the orphans pair off, at the order of their master, and attempt to kill each other. The master explains that this is because the winner must prove he/she has the mental strength to kill at will; the loser's death is acceptable because his weaknesses were exposed.

But really, is that any way to start a revolution?

Ueto may be cute as a button, but she doesn't have the dramatic heft to handle her emotional scenes. Neither is she physically convincing; for a character that's supposed to have been through a decade of hard training, it seems as if Ueto had first picked up a sword about an hour before the cameras rolled.

Somebody should have screened a few Ziyi Zhang martial arts films to show her how it's done.

-- Advisory: This film contains some bloody violence, but it doesn't go overboard.

-- G. Allen Johnson

'State of Fear'

Documentary. Directed by Pamela Yates. In Spanish and English with subtitles. (Not rated. 94 minutes. At the Roxie.)

"State of Fear" is an informative and valuable documentary about the past 30 years of messy times in Peru, but it is also frustrating.

Director Pamela Yates structures the film around suggesting parallels between President Bush's "war on terror" and former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori's hijacking of democracy to combat the Shining Path (Bush is never mentioned by name, but the code words are obvious). Frankly, I don't care.

What I do care about is Peru and its people, and why tens of thousands of people, many innocent, were killed in a conflict between a Marxist terrorist organization and a military force that, thanks to Fujimori's hijacked democracy, operated with impunity.

Fortunately, Yates and her producer, Paco de Onis, have gathered wonderful footage of both rural Peru and the metropolis of its capital city, Lima, and do a good job of letting witnesses and victims of this turbulent time tell their fascinating stories.

The filmmakers apparently had full access to the Truth Commission's materials, including archival footage and transcripts, which they've put to good use.

Yet, like many modern documentaries, "State of Fear" is not very detail oriented. OK, Shining Path gained footing because rural people were poor and upper-crust Lima society was rich. But what was the economy based on, what was the per-capita income of the rural poor, and how could they expect that to change if Shining Path's goals were attained?

What is going on in Peru now, politically and economically? How have the lives of rural people changed?

Yates, who made a very good documentary about the San Francisco public defender's office in 2002 called "Presumed Guilty," obviously has a passion for her subjects, and "State of Fear" is helpful for those who know nothing about the strife in Peru (you would not be alone; it wasn't very well reported by the American media).

Just don't expect a great film.

-- Advisory: This film contains archival footage of bloodied corpses and graphic descriptions by survivors.